At night, the dead: is a darkly delectable poetry collection written by Lisa Ciccarello, one of the winners of the Blood Pudding Press chapbook contest. Why not give yourself or a unique love of yours a macabre gift of resonant words bound in an artsy volume.
The lovely cover art was designed by artist Emma Trithart.
The cover stock is pale gray, deckle-edged; the text stock is ivory, deckle-edged. The pages are hand-numbered and spider-stamped. This tome is bound with ribbon and will also be tied up with even more ribbon.
At night, the dead: may be procured individually for $7.00 or may be purchased as part of a Combination Package with another Blood Pudding Press chapbook of your choice for a substantial savings (please see separate listing). For trade copy or review copy inquiries, please feel free to contact me.
Here is an excerpt from the collection:
At night, the dead:
the dark is a black bag where the eyes are kept. In the dark you walk with arms outstretched. I want to keep telling you about the dead. They write the same word over & over again. They make it like a path to walk by.
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"Anyone who uses words like thrice & tautology deserves 5 stars. This is a hot chapbook, production top notch!"
J. Michael Wahlgren, poet and editor
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This title was buzzed about via the first-ever Read Write Poem's Virtual Book Tour:
http://readwritepoem.org/blog/2009/08/26/read-write-poem-virtual-book-tour-%e2%80%98at-night-the-dead%e2%80%99-by-lisa-ciccarello/
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NEW! Here are some excerpts from a review by Erin McKnight, published in the literary/art mag. Prick of the Spindle:
“Located within the staccato-stylized house is a narrator ‘learning to knit [them] a new home’ with spare language woven by her breath. This narrator comes to appreciate that ‘The dead need chandeliers’ and ‘someone to smile at,’ that ‘they still have what matters’ and rely on the voice of the living to interpret their coming and the guise of night to expose what is typically obscured by daylight.
And it is under this cover of darkness that the collection transcends predictability in rendering vignettes of otherworldly disturbance. The desperate longing of Ciccarello’s dead is suspended just beyond the thick boundary of text isolating each poem as tomb-like: the repeating ‘At night, the dead:’ caption functioning as a black mound of words excavated from Ciccarello’s exposed plots. The demarcation of her fright-filled house, however, shifts in the same imperceptible manner as her poems’ repeating lead-in--by the collection’s end, the dead have penetrated both the narrator’s space and the reader’s psyche with their doleful longing for kinship and remembrance…
At night, the dead: is a daring, resolute grouping of poetic works that meets the reader’s demand for melancholic language and uncanny image, and exceeds the expectation of how lasting the influence of a sinister mood may prove.”